Post by Joanna on Mar 17, 2019 18:46:11 GMT -5
Woman Who Sank into Parents' Grave Sues Cemetery
A woman visiting her parents’ Long Island burial plot descended into more than despair – she sank hip-deep into their grave, a lawsuit claims. Joanne Cullen bent down at the headstone to fix a bow on a wreath and suddenly found herself being swallowed by a sinkhole.
“It caused her to fall forward and smash her head on the tombstone,” cracking a tooth, her lawyer, Joseph Perrini, told The Post. She attempted to “bounce back and she started sinking into the ground and grabbed the sides of the tombstone,” he added. Terrified, Cullen yelled for help, but only the dead heard her cries. The creepy calamity occurred at dusk on December 19, 2016. “Getting sucked into your parents’ grave when you go to visit them on a cool December afternoon with the sun going down ... it’s terrifying and traumatizing,” the lawyer continued.
After being hit by Cullen’s $5 million lawsuit, now it’s the St. Charles Resurrection Cemetery administrators’ turn to shiver in fear.
The 64-year-old resident of North Bellmore, Long Island, claimed the chilling incident in the Farmingdale graveyard – where her mother, Evelyn (a bookkeeper), and father, John (a roofer) are buried – has left her an emotional wreck. “I will never go back there again,” she declared through her attorney, who claimed she now fears walking in open fields and “has nightmares” and headaches. The lawsuit alleges she also is in need of counseling.
Perrini contends the grave diggers who backfilled an adjacent grave to that of Cullen’s parents left an underground void that caused his client to sink into the netherworld.
Source: Dean Balsamini, The New York Post, March 16, 2019.
